Badiou: Politics, Beings and Events

Arena Quarterly no.18

Justin Clemens

Jun 2024

Alain Badiou’s work must be seen as an integrated whole, responding to the Left’s epochal 70s failure. His system, and understanding it, is now as essential to a new politics as was Marx’s.

Brighter Than Ten Thousand Suns?

Arena Quarterly no.18

Christian Caiconte

Jun 2024

Artists may aspire to create autonomous subjectivities, but they do so within determined social contexts. The more ambitious an entire exhibition is to escape such determinants, the more we need to ask, without fear or favour, whether the works within have not been wholly drawn back in.

Of Something Already Fading in the World

Arena Quarterly no.18

Valerie Krips

Jun 2024

These men are as they are because their existence matters to no one: literally removed from other people in their building, they represent the collapse of the social ties that once bound communities together.

Reply to Scott Robinson’s Critique of Degrowth

Arena Quarterly no.18

Terry Leahy

Jun 2024

In Arena 17, Scott Robinson argued that degrowthers draw on naturalistic metaphors, opening the door to technocracy. Leahy argues they look for real limits within nature, while elaborating a full politics.

Class Warfare: The invasion of STEM education by weapons companies

Arena Quarterly no.18

Jenny Grounds

Jun 2024

The National Youth Science Forum is partnered with the largest producer of weapons—including nuclear weapons—on the planet: Lockheed Martin

Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere: On eating animals

Arena Online

Melanie Joy

23 Aug 2024

By striving for human justice while neglecting justice for animals, we inadvertently sustain the very mindset responsible for human exploitation.

Hijabi Atheists, the Artists, and Infidel Birds…

Arena Quarterly no.18

Christopher Houston

Jun 2024

As Istanbul rejects Erdoğan, its recent history of dissent, where poets, draft refusers and post-theist Muslims perch.

Blank Verse

Arena Quarterly no.18

Dan Tout

Jun 2024

Ford and Clemens have produced a highly original account of the complex contribution to Australian law, politics and poetics made by this ‘largely unacknowledged’ and pun-inducing figure—‘a man with a pun for a name’—here introduced as one of Australia’s founding fathers.

Policing protest in an age of hypervisible genocide: lessons for settler-Australia

Arena Online

Lora Chapman

23 Aug 2024

It is only by sitting with and accepting this reality, by sharing it with those around us and by being compelled to action and solidarity that we are likely to find any sustained sense of relief.

Reconstituting a Radical and Critical Politics for the Twenty-First Century

Arena Quarterly no.18

John Hinkson

Jun 2024

The increasing visibility of a crisis in human life shows the inadequacy of current approaches on the Left. Only by going to the heart of contemporary processes, and their role within that crisis, can committed intellectuals develop a transformative approach.

From the Archive

Green Pathways to a People’s Future

Arena Quarterly no. 1

Adam Bandt

‘Fire’ may be an appropriate way to think and talk about the climate-change emergency, not just because we are literally dealing with a burning world but also because it does not bring with it the concerns associated with ‘rule by emergency’.

From the Archive

The Tip of the Democracy-Sinking Iceberg

Timothy Erik Ström

There is a curious and seldom-told backstory and parallel story to the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, one that makes the notorious firm seem like the tip of the democracy-sinking iceberg.

Raw Conservatism and the Aristopops

Arena Quarterly no.18

Simon Cooper

Jun 2024

US postliberalism doesn’t understand the nature of the crisis it has identified.

Luso Dreaming: Portugal Turns Right

Arena Quarterly no.18

Fernanda Trecenti

Jun 2024

Portugal’s surging CHEGA movement, like Brazil’s Bolsonaro, draws on the lusophone cultural singularity of ‘saudade’—a nostalgia for a past that never was

A Postcard from Albania: On the Legacy of Twentieth-Century State Socialism

Arena Online

Andreas Pohl

9 Aug 2024

As Albania remodels itself as a Mediterranean holiday playground, the connection between history and politics recedes.

On Paper: The Fate of Handwriting Education

Arena Online

Scott Robinson

9 Aug 2024

Our wish for education to constantly improve leads to fatal attempts to produce the new by force, leaving us tripping over the present in our attempt to claim our relevance in the future.

Standing Ground in a Turning World

Richard King

15 Jul 2024

With the Gaza protests, the Left has reunified around a material approach. Extending that to a reflection on deeper social changes of recent decades is the key to a re-oriented politics capable of gaining ground.

Australian Film Co-ops

Arena Quarterly no.18

Hanna Chetwin

Jun 2024

The co-op started running screenings on the top floor of the Third World Bookshop in the early 1970s. Before long, screenings were taking place all over Australia.